[derefr]

Can ADSL survive an acoustic coupler?

To give it a fair shot, assume the driver and microphone are studio quality rather than the kind you’d find on a 1970s telephone handset. I bet it’d work pretty well.

But the real question would then be: how much of an air gap could you create and still get a connection?

Could you post to HN on an ADSL signal that’s being screamed across the length of the room you’re sitting in?

[detaro]

ADSL upstream starts at 25kHz, downstream at >120kHz. So probably not. Purpose-designed ultrasonic hardware might be able to.

[londons_explore]

Or an acoustic coupler which also acts a little like an electrical coupler at higher frequencies because it has no electrical shielding...

[codeflo]

Not sure if this is within the spirit of the question, but: The individual ADSL bands are only 4 kHz wide, so you could modulate 4 or 5 of them down into the audible range (20Hz - 20kHz) and back up again after the transmission through the acoustic coupler. In theory, ADSL should then pick those bands to transmit the data.